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Theory of Literature
gradually." 13 Our criterion is inclusiveness : "imaginative in-
tegration" and "amount (and diversity) of material inte-
grated." 14 The tighter the organization of the poem, the higher
its value, according to formalistic criticism, which indeed often
limits itself, in practice, to works so complex of structures as to
need and reward exegesis. These complexities may be on one or
more levels. In Hopkins, they are primarily dictional, syntactical,
prosodic; but there may also, or instead, be complexities on the
level of imagery or thematics or tone or plot: the works of
highest value are complex also in those upper structures.
By diversity of materials, we may mean particularly ideas,
characters, types of social and psychological experience. Eliot's
celebrated instance in "The Metaphysical Poets" is relevant. By
way of showing that the poet's mind is "constantly amalgamat-
ing disparate experience," he imagines such a whole formed of
the poet's falling in love, reading Spinoza, hearing the sound of
a typewriter, and smelling something cooking. Dr. Johnson had
described this same amalgamation as a discordia concors, and,
thinking of failures rather than successes in the method, finds
that "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."
A later writer on the "Metaphysicals," George Wil-
liamson, singles out, for the most part, the successes. Our prin-
ciple here would be that, provided a real "amalgamation" takes
place, the value of the poem rises in direct ratio to the diversity
of its materials.
In Three Lectures on Aesthetic y Bosanquet distinguishes "easy
beauty" from "difficult beauty," with its "intricacy," "tension,"
and "width." We might express the distinction as between a
beauty achieved out of tractable materials (euphony, pleasing
visual images, the "poetic subject") and beauty wrested from
materials which, as materials, are recalcitrant: the painful, the
ugly, the didactic, the practical. This distinction was adumbrated
by the eighteenth century in its contrast of the "beautiful" and
the "sublime" ("difficult beauty"). The "sublime" and the
"characteristic" aestheticize that which appears "unaesthetic."
Tragedy invades and gives expressive form to the painful;
comedy similarly masters the ugly. The easier beauties are im-
mediately agreeable in their "materials" and their plastic
"forms"; difficult beauty is one of expressive form.